One of the aspects of contemporary technology that is closest to our everyday lives and yet whose physical appearance is unfamiliar to most people - plant engineering.
And four photographers.
The design of this book is extremely simple. On the one hand there was the need to document fully, and at the same time in a manner that is accessible to the lay reader, one of those frontiers of technology that contribute to make today's world if not "the best of all possible worlds" then certainly the most bearable and the most decent. On the other, however, a choice was made not to take the most obvious, and in many respects now rather too well-trodden, route of straightforward documentation, perhaps taking a cue from some more or less explicit rhetoric of celebration. Instead it was decided to opt unequivocally for expressive interpretation, leaving each of the contributors complete liberty to portray and elaborate linguistically the subjects selected.
Is this "art to order"? Of course it is, and in the noblest and most intelligent way that our culture - that child of haf-digested Romantic slogans demanding total artistic freedom and the cult of a genius that is as often as not debatable in the extreme - can afford today. Above all the approach offers those who wish to go beyond a superficial assessment to gauge not merely the level of invention and linguistic autonomy that an author who is not bound by false mythologies of art is able to maintain when confronting topics assigned by others (indeed from one point of view almost the entire history of photography, as well as much of painting, is made up of images with a precise functional purpose. These images are perfectly integrated into the media system and its ramifications). However it should also be appreciated how inventiveness, imagination and inspiration, rather than just the arid application of a mechanical process, are present in what we call technique, for this is something we rarely manage to savour to the full.
In other words, who but and artist can read under the intractable carapace of utterly rational technological processes, the deeper logic of the poetry that is engineering and the inexpressible intuitive comprehension of the world that transforms the construction of machinery into something far more important and "true" than its rigid formal discipline ordinarily makes it appear?
Here in the homeland of Pier Luigi Nervi and Enzo Ferrari, to name but two outstanding examples, the poetry of the engineer should be included automatically in any discussion of the arts. It is that poetry that Giampietro Agostini, Tancredi Mangano, Filippo Maggia and Natale Zoppis were asked to transcribe through the medium of their own, quite independent, poetic abilities.
After reading the photographs, we will still be none the wiser about how the marvellous machines illustrated work. We shall know however; that a spirit and an intelligence conceived and loved them, choosing for them a form that is not - nor could have been - the outcome of mere cold arithmetic.
In 1921, Carlo Carrà painted a marvellous picture entitled L'amante dell'ingegnere ("The Engineer's Lover"), and more than one artist from Duchamp to Tinguely has attempted to construct "celibate" machines as complicated and ingenious as real ones but with no function. Here, our photographers demonstrate that after all machines can function without losing any of their conceptual or formal interest and without having to be considered less "artistic". Above all they show that machines far from being celibate, are actually the lovers of the engineer that created them.

[...] Agostini took as his starting point the materials and structures of the plants. The modular repetition of the elements, and the vaguely disquieting - yet at the same time arrestingly powerful - sensory impact of the metal components, are frozen in Agostini's images in a sort of surrealistic vision transfixed by the architectural lines of the machines. Of the four photographers, Agostini is the most willing to take on the rhetorical role of precise, unemotional narrator of his subject. He does so rhetorically, that is to say with a hypertrophic accentuation of optical lucidity, and an expressive neutrality that has calculated rationally the distance of the eye from its subject. The models for Agostini's work are not to be sought so much in the tradition, important though it may be, of the photography of urban reportage. They are to be found rather in the subtle critiques of a line of conceptual imagerie deriving from the uncompromising work on industrial architecture done by Bernhard and Hilla Becher and from the visual Popism of Dan Graham and Victor Burgin. [...]